Recent studies have shown that over 85% of the information people and organizations deal with is unstructured ' the vast majority of which is text in different forms. A multitude of techniques has to be used in order to enable intelligent access to this information and support transforming it to forms that allow sensible use of the information. The fundamental issue that all these techniques have to address is that of semantics ' there is a need to move toward understanding the text at an appropriate level, beyond the word level, in order to support access, knowledge extraction and synthesis. We will discuss two key issues: (1) From Data to Meaning: There are several dimensions of text understanding that can facilitate access to information and the extraction of knowledge from unstructured text, and (2) Trustworthiness of Information: While we can locate and extract information quite reliably, we lack ready means to determine whether we should actually believe them.